Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

Why so popular? Why a sequel so soon? Well, two things: First, it's an attempt to enlist quantum mechanics in a non-materialist interpretation of reality. Second, 14 top scientists and mystics have come forward to say that science and religion describe the same phenomena.

Book review: Norbert Smith's Passive Fear: The alternative to fight or flight

We’ve all heard about fight or flight. Every popular science pundit can explain it But are those the animal’s only options?

How Smith, now retired, got into wildlife zoology, after a boyhood spent with animals, is a story in itself: Out collecting frogs and snakes with his graduate Ecology class at Baylor, he noticed the distinctive eye-shine of an alligator. He offered to catch the class an alligator, an offer they dismissed because they had not even seen it and he was the newest student, from Oklahoma. But, he recounts, "Undaunted, I called the alligator by imitating the grunting alarm call of young alligators and splashed my hand in the water. The alligator immediately swam midway across the pond toward me. It swam right up to my feet and I jumped on it." He was able to demonstrate interesting adaptations of alligators for the class, but - much more - he could actually bring them in. That got his profs’ attention.

What got Smith's attention was the discovery that many species of reptiles and mammals have a third option when threatened: Instead of fighting or fleeing, they drastically lower their metabolism and wait it out. What's really interesting about Smith's finding is how it went against all the textbooks and it could never have been made in a lab.

Thinkquote of the day: New species seldom or never observed

A key problem with the argument over Darwinian evolution (evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations) is that so few actual examples of speciation (new species forming) have ever been observed that we really have no way of knowing for sure whether Darwin had the right idea. That is precisely why acceptance of Darwinism is so often treated as some kind of loyalty test for science; in reality, the Darwinist is taking a great deal on faith.

As Jonathan Wells noted in his controversial Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,

So except for polyploidy in plants, which is not what Darwin's theory needs, there are no observed instances of the origin of species. As evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in 2002: "Speciation, whether in the remote Galapagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers, or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced." Evolution's smoking gun is still missing.

(Note: Polyploidy is gene-swapping by the doubling of chromosomes, from which new species of plants can arise. (But it's no particular help to Darwin's theory because sexual reproduction is not involved.) Drosophilosophers is a humorous coinage for researchers who study fruit flies (drosophilus spp.).)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

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Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.